The spirit of ’68 lives on! Palestine advocacy and the indivisibility of justice

This article is the first of a series by Dr. Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi on a federal complaint filed against her and San Francisco State University by a pro-Israel law firm.

On Monday, June 19,2017, the Lawfare Project filed a frivolous and bogus lawsuit against San Francisco State University. Full of inaccuracies, misrepresentations and outright falsehoods, the lawsuit named several university administrators and me as defendants.

I learned I was being sued on Friday, June 23. I should also add that I have not been informed nor contacted by my university to offer legal representation, support or protection as per faculty rights at SFSU and the California State University system. When I contacted the university two weeks later, thinking that it was a proforma email to confirm support, the university counsel would not confirm such a thing. Instead, he told me that responding to my question would take a few days because of a scheduling conflict. Meanwhile, he proceeded to inform me that there were a couple of public records request from the Lawfare lawsuit focusing on me and An-Najah National University and any discussion of student exchange between SFSU and An-Najah.

The September attack by Campus Watch labeled An-Najah National University as a terrorist university, citing none other than the discredited Anti-Defamation League (ADL). ADL’s history includes spying on 647 organizations including the NAACP, ACLU, Asian Law Caucus, Centro Legal de la Raza, Irish Northern Aid, Japanese-American Citizens League, the National Indian Treaty Council, Earth Island Institute and 20 trade union locals plus the San Francisco Labor Council. The ADL had also spied on and provided intelligence to the Apartheid regime in South Africa, including the African National Congress whom the ADL Director called a terrorist organization as well. The ADL also kept 77 files on 58 Arab-American organizations and thousands on individual Arab Americans, including Alex Odeh, the late West Coast Coordinator of the American Arab anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) who was assassinated by a pipe bomb in his office in 1985. A search of the office/home of the ADL spy turned up keys to Alex Odeh’s office. The ADL is part of the right-wing network of pro-Israeli organizations to which AMCHA, Stand With Us, Horowitz, Campus Watch, Middle East Forum, the David Project, and the Lawfare Project belong. It is worth noting that ADL funders include the Koch Brothers, the Bradley Foundation and the Koret Foundation. The latter also funds Stand With Us, Zionist Organization of America and several other Zionist groups. Koret Foundation is cited in the Lawfare lawsuit [page 38] as reversing its decision to fund SFSU to the tune of $1.5 million following the student protest against the racist mayor of occupied Jerusalem Nir Barkat.

Rabab Abdulhadi at the South African memorial of the 1976 student uprising against Bantu education. (Photo courtesy of the author)

The lawsuit deliberately misrepresents and smears the social justice legacy of SFSU. The lawsuit starts off with a vicious attack against the historic 1968 Student Strike led by the Black Student Union (BSU) and the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF). The Zionists have argued in this lawsuit and elsewhere that demands (exemplified by BSU/TWLF in SF in 1968 as well as the Oceanhill Brownsville in New York—both coalitions of many people of conscience led by liberation movement and community organization) for revising the Eurocentric, colonial and racist curriculum and its replacement by a curriculum that reflects the pedagogy of the oppressed, and that recognizes, validates and legitimizes the lived experiences and the knowledge produced by and about Indigenous communities, communities of color, poor and marginalized communities are inherently anti-Semitic. In effect, the larger project of this lawsuit, as well as other campaigns by Israel’s apologists, seek to kill the spirit of ’68, what it represents and the emancipatory potential it offers to the study of Palestine as well as Arab and Muslim communities and thus reinstate the power differential to white supremacy and elite privilege. The lawsuit also seeks to seal the erroneous equation that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism and to lump all Jews across time, place and history into one monolithic unit that is united around Israel and its racism, colonialism and apartheid. Palestinian scholarship that places justice at the center of its inquiry such as that which is exemplified by the AMED Studies program is inspired by the spirit of 68 and extends the premise of anti-colonial and anti-racist justice-centered knowledge production to Palestine and Arab and Muslim community studies.

Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi (C) with the General Union of Palestine Students at San Francisco State University celebrate the 9th annual commemoration of the Edward Said mural on campus, 2016. (Photo: Jaime Veve/Facebook)

Here, I do not dispute the premise of the lawsuit that pedagogy, scholarship and public advocacy for justice for/in Palestine on SFSU is grounded in the spirit of ’68. Our struggle for justice in/for Palestine is part and parcel of the long-term struggle for justice for Indigenous communities, third world communities, communities of color, poor and marginalized communities. We are proud to have started and continue to build the AMED Studies Program as a justice-centered academic, research and community transparent, critically engaged and accountable program that stresses academic excellence and open spaces for students, faculty and community members to realize their aspirations and not accept internalized colonialism and racism nor place limits on the possibilities of what they can accomplish. Our struggle since 2007 and more so since 2010 has been exactly to convince SFSU that the university would be doing the right thing to defend its social justice legacy and not bow down to the racist and colonial project of the Israel lobby industry who are not only intent on silencing advocacy for Palestine but are equally invested in dismantling the spirit of ’68 and the radical mission of pedagogy and scholarship in critical Indigenous and third world studies and by extension AMED Studies. AMED was and continues to structurally reflect the spirit of ’68. Though we’ve been starved and reduced into a token faculty member with no staff and no operating budget, our broad-based and principled community of justice extends from veterans of the 1968 strike, a coalition of student groups who fight injustice in Palestine with the same breath they fight to reclaim our university’s social justice mission.

AMED Studies teach-in.

The lawsuit cites and joins with the discredited co-founder of the AMCHA project, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, in her racist attack against Ethnic Studies. Rossman-Benjamin attributed what she describes as inherent anti-Semitism to the 1968 SFSU Student Strike led by the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front that led to the creation of the College of Ethnic Studies in 1969. The attack against the anti-colonial and anti-racist spirit of ’68, is grounded in racism, white supremacy and privilege. Reproduced in the lawsuit, these assertion of white, Eurocentric and colonial privilege are not new. They regurgitate the archives of ADL, Campus Watch, David Horowitz and the rest of the Israel lobby industry. As the Backlash Report clearly shows, it is an industry, not a hyperbole. Literally, millions of dollars finance these organizations that make up this industry in which careers are made and where individuals associated with these organizations profit both directly and indirectly from these hasbara operations.

It is unfortunate that SFSU Department of Jewish Studies has decided to publicly subscribe to the false allegations of Hillel, Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and the Lawfare project that define opposition to Israeli colonialism, racism and apartheid as anti-Semitism. According to its director, Brooke Goldstein, the goal of the Lawfare Project is to “make the enemy pay.” It is disappointing (but not unexpected given its history upon which I will elaborate in a future article) that the Department of Jewish Studies has in effect decided to participate in promoting the new McCarthyism that produced an unsafe and hostile work and study environment for Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians and other marginalized groups at SFSU. New McCarthyism aims at silencing advocates for justice in Palestine by producing a chilling effect and by enlisting hegemonic knowledge against challenges to the status quo.

The involvement of the Department of Jewish Studies in fanning the flames of Islamophobia and embracing the racist mayor of occupied Jerusalem or the insistence that Hillel must be involved in everything on campus is particularly disconcerting. On the same day that David Horowitz and Canary Mission plastered a new set of Islamophobic, racist and bullying posters on our campus, Fred Astren and Marc Dollinger, Chair and senior professors in SFSU Department of Jewish Studies, published an article in the Jewish News of Northern California in which they attacked Palestinian students in two incidents that are also cited in the lawsuit and did not dissociate themselves from the racist mayor of occupied Jerusalem and his policies that systematically target Palestinians and uproot Palestinians from their homeland.

Those of us steeped in the 1960s politics do not refer to Palestine as the only or the last occupation. We do not celebrate the July 4th nor “Thanksgiving”. Instead, we mourn with our Indigenous sisters and brothers with the same resolve as that with which we stand with Standing Rock and the families of kids killed by the police, whether in the U.S., Brazil, Egypt or the streets of Jerusalem. We did not and do not engage in oppression Olympics nor see each oppression as exceptional or unique to Palestinians. We recognize that each context has its own dynamics and do not intend to flatten experiences or oversimplify but we call out oppression when we see it and we celebrate the resilience and steadfastness of all our peoples wherever they may be.

This is where our commitment to the spirit of ’68 comes in and this is where we see our solid and strategic alliances with those who reject oppression. Unlike the current Zionist coalition (Hillel, JCRC, JS) that is attempting to silence us on campus by bullying, intimidation, harassment and outright lies. We do not exceptionalize Palestine nor advocate for the justice of our people at the expense of others. This is what we learned from our elders and this is what we teach our youth and the future generations.

The Israel lobby industry seeks to exploit the real dangers of anti-Semitism that stem from the rise and popularity of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, encouraged by the election of Donald Trump. As a result, anti-Semitism is used by the Israel lobby industry to sneak in justifications for the unjustifiable Israeli settler-colonial project that has uprooted and displaced Palestinians while collaborating with the most racist, genocidal and bloody regimes and violent regimes and entities from South African Apartheid racist regime, the death squads of El Salvador and Guatemala, Papa Doc Duvalier, and today’s Modi’s bloody rule in India and occupied Kashmir.

About Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi

Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Race and Resistance Studies and the Senior Scholar at the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies at San Francisco State University.

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4 Responses

Wow, this bully tactic is undoubtedly horrendous to experience on an individual level.

Reminds me of dissidents in Soviet Union, and their persecution, smears, loss of jobs and homes, and frequent arrests for wrong take on political issues.

Having said that, there is an effect on society, when they can see those who raise their head above the parapet: It opens their minds onto the possibility of existence of another view, separate from “official viewpoint”.

Of course, the official reason for picking on people is to send the warning, that the stand will cost you (and your family, if you have dependants). It is no different from gangsters beating you up with a baseball bat. The principle is the same:

Standing up to bullies is painful.

But a wonderful thing sometimes happens: the silent majority, without making the grand stand, makes dozens of small gestures of support, and slowly, the clout of a bully is diminished.

I wish you all the best in your work to bring social justice to USA and to Palestine.

Good heavens.
I knew that the Anti-Defamation League was now no more than a shill for Israel. But I had thought that in the past, it was a civil-liberties organization. I didn’t know that it supported civil liberties for Jews, but attacked them for anyone else.

Some time ago I read something by, I think, Steven Rosen, that said there were professors who were fired, or otherwise suffered in their academic careers, for their support of Israel. [Sic!] I wrote back and asked for a few examples. He couldn’t think of any off the top of his head [I wonder why!], but directed me to CampusWatch. Nothing – of course. I asked a few people, e.g. Norman Finklestein, who were in a position to know, if there were any such people. Nope.

Thank you for sharing your experience. It’s sad that the university has not come to your defense. I maintain that the best thing Palestinians can do is train their children to become lawyers and politicians in the United States. This type of bullying should not hold up in a court of law. Let the sunshine disinfect their accusations, shine a spotlight on them.

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